Skeleton Chef and Cupcake Spider Jack o’ Lanterns

I’m always inspired to bring a foodie element into my Halloween pumpkin carving and my pumpkins this year were no exception. My first creation was a Skeleton Chef, a skull with a little chef’s hat on top. I wish I had had a slightly larger pumpkin to give me a little more room for the hat, but the finished effect was still both cute and creepy.

My second pumpkin was a big black widow spider, but instead of a red hour glass on the spider, I added in a sculpted cupcake. When I say that I sculpted the cupcake, I mean that I carved it into the pumpkin without going all the way through the rind. I used the same technique last year with my I Vant A Cupcake pumpkin, where I also gave a more detailed description of how the cupcake was created. For this Cupcake Spider pumpkin, I carved out the cupcake design first so that my work surface would be as stable as possible, then I carved out the spider around it. Be sure to get your cupcake as thin as possible so that you can see the detail when you light up the jack o’lantern!

I didn’t make templates for these two shapes because I free-handed the designs. Since I was able to do this, that means that they’re pretty straightforward designs with just a few simple lines. Sketch your shapes onto a pumpkin with a pen before taking a knife. And when carving outlines, remember that you can always make a shape wider by trimming the edges, but you can’t put pumpkin back once you’ve carved it away.